1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention generally relate to managing data in a virtual computing environment and, in particular, to executing tasks on one or more virtual machines systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many companies take advantage of virtualization solutions to consolidate several specialized physical servers and workstations into fewer servers running virtual machines. Each virtual machine can be configured with its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., processor, memory, ports, and the like) such that specialized services that each of the previous physical machines performed can be run in their native operating system. In particular, a virtualization layer, or hypervisor, allocates the computing resources of one or more host servers to one or more virtual machines and further provides for isolation between such virtual machines. In such a manner, the virtual machine is a representation of a physical machine by software.
Certain host servers also include a service console that provides a management layer for the virtual machine(s) and/or functions as the operating system of the host server. The service console, however, generally has limited access to host system resources, such as processing time and memory, since such resources are generally allocated and reserved for use by the virtual machines and their respective hypervisors. For instance, certain service consoles may be limited to accessing a single processor, even if the host server includes multiple processors, and approximately 100 MB of memory (e.g., RAM).
To manage applications and execute tasks on the data of one or more virtual machine disks, many vendors install agents or daemons within the service console. These agents and daemons persistently reside on and/or are registered with the host server in order to perform their respective operations. However, because each virtual machine and/or hypervisor can be associated with its own set of agents, the combined load of the several agents can adversely impact the performance of the host server, such as by consuming valuable system resources (e.g., processing power and memory), even when the specific jobs of the agents are not being performed.